HEALTHCARE ESTATES 2022 KEYNOTES – SUSTAINABILITY
The UK’s current main energy generation sources.
National Grid data In August 2022, she explained, the National Grid had published figures on a monthly basis; these showed that of the total UK energy requirement, gas made up just under 50%, wind, 15-16%, nuclear, 15%, and – even in the middle of summer, solar was only giving us 7%. Pointing to another slide, Dame Sue said: “Going back to what I was saying earlier, this is a National Grid view of a day in the life in 2035. So, by 2035, National Grid says we should have built 25-35 GW of onshore wind capacity, and 55-65 GW of offshore wind capacity, and yet today we are at levels way below this. It’s clear that we have a massive hurdle to overcome in what needs to be built in the timescale. National Grid also expects us to still have 8-10 gigawatts of nuclear power, and unless we start building new nuclear power stations pretty rapidly, we won’t have it. The slide of the imaginary day in 2035’s energy sources in the UK is simply aspirational as things stand – because at the moment the engineering reality just isn’t there to deliver it.”
Is the answer coupling renewables with battery storage?
Low carbon electricity-generating sources The speaker explained that, currently, our low carbon electricity-generating sources were nuclear, biomass, hydro, marine, solar, and wind turbines, and of those, wind and nuclear made ‘by far and away the lowest carbon contributions’. She said: “Although biomass’s emissions are a lot lower than coal or gas, it is still a polluting fuel unless we also put it with carbon capture and sequestration.” Looking next at how long nuclear
energy would be available to the UK – without the construction of any new plants – and the speaker pointed out that all of our current nuclear power plants except Sizewell B in Suffolk will have been ‘retired’ by the end of the decade. She explained: “The government has asked EDF to look at extending the lives of the Heysham and Hartlepool nuclear plants beyond 2024, because if we lose these nuclear stations, we will lose a significant chunk of solid base load energy, and currently, gas is the only replacement for that that will deliver power to the grid when it’s necessary.”
info@shj.co.uk Focusing on new-build aspirations,
plans for a number of potential plants – for example at Wylfa Newydd in Anglesey, and Moorside at Sellafield, had been abandoned, and the only plant currently under construction was at Hinkley Point in Somerset, with work still yet to start on a planned new additional facility at Sizewell. Dame Sue said: “These are the big stations that deliver 1.6 gigawatts each.” She noted here that, against this backdrop, Rolls-Royce has been working hard to deliver small modular reactors, and – like the healthcare sector – adopting offsite manufacture and design for manufacture and assembly to create them. The result was that they could be built in a 3-4-year timeframe, instead of taking 7-10 years to build. This was, she believed, ‘probably our best hope for rapid delivery of nuclear power stations’.
Nuclear’s ‘additional functionality’ “Nuclear does have some additional functionality, because we can couple it with heat generation and hydrogen generation – since nuclear power stations
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